Morawa Scene: Article 03—Why Morawa?
This is the third article I have put together for publishing in the Morawa Scene. This article was published in issue 270 on the 24th of November 2023.
As a general rule I publish these article here about two weeks after they appear in the Morawa Scene.
For those that want to see the article in the layout that it was published then you can click on the image provided. Otherwise the content below the ruling is exactly the same as that in the layout image.
The previous such article “Tanks on the Main Street” can be found here.
There are a lot of things that I wish I had asked more questions about when my father, Sydney (Syd) Lodge, was still alive. But I suppose the questions I have now are not things you think about much until you get into your later years.
One such mystery that I often ponder now is why did Percy Harry Lodge (a.k.a. Yorkie Lodge) sell what, by all accounts, was a perfectly good business in Yorkshire in the U.K. (an Inn) and drag his family—wife, kids, sister, and brother—firstly to Claremont in Perth and then to Morawa; sans his brother and sister who remained in Claremont.
Why Morawa? If he was looking for a country business to buy then there would have been numerous better options available at the time than Morawa. A town that was on the very edge of farmable land and had summer temperatures that routinely went over 100˚F and were known to touch 110 three or four times a year.
In fact Morawa as a town did not really exist at the time Yorkie bought the store from Mr. Samual Moore circa 1919/20. At that time it was just a locality. A locality that, at the time, had no railway, power, phone, medical services, or hotel. The ‘main’ road from Wubin to Mullewa did not even go through Morawa. It went from Koolanooka through the salt lakes behind Morawa to Pintharuka.
Koolanooka was planned to be the major town in the area—not Morawa.
But, for reasons I will likely never know, Yorkie put his faith in a tiny little store in small dusty hot Morawa.
From the information I can find it would appear that Percy Lodge travelled from the U.K. to Fremantle Port at the end of 1912 on the Steam Ship Gothic. He was followed by his family a year later in 1913. I then have him purchasing the store in Morawa around 1919/1920. This does not mean he moved the family from Claremont to Morawa at that time. In fact I think it is likely that he and his eldest son Maurice possibly ran the store for a number of years until he built the house in Morawa (shown in the picture below next to the shop).
If this is the case then I am not sure where he and Maurice lived. It could well be that they lived in the shop, but I cannot find any records to help me confirm this.
Based on a clip from The West Australian from Oct 1929 (included in insert) I am going to assume that Yorkie started building the house next to the shop around 1929/30. Hence, it is likely the rest of his family moved to Morawa sometime late-ish in 1930, being some ten years after the shop was purchased.
During these ten years the railway line was extended from Miling through to Mullewa via Koolanooka and Morawa. This happened around 1927.
Unlike the Midlands line through Carnamah and Three springs, which was owned by a private company, the Wongan Hills to Mullewa line was government built and owned.
About the time that the railway line was put through a more trafficable road was constructed between Koolanooka and Morawa that followed along the east side of the line and came into Morawa on the ‘right’ (east) side of town.
Additionally, around 1928/29, electricity came to Morawa when Mr. George Tilley began providing 32 volt DC power to the town.
I am not sure when Morawa got a telephone service. I can find where Merkanooka had an exchange in 1937 but I can’t find useful data relating to Morawa. However, I do know that when the exchange did go in that P. H. Lodge & Sons were Morawa 2. I have no idea who or what was Morawa 1 on the exchange. Maybe the exchange itself?
I estimate this picture to have been taken around mid- to late-1930. This dating assumes that this photograph was taken as a record of P. H. Lodge’s new house.The next and fourth article in this series, “The Ledger”, his here.
